Hospital Wayfinding App Guides Patients and Visitors

From surgery theaters to hospital parking lots and beyond, mobile and wearable health tech hardware developments and apps play ever-widening roles in the complex wellness and medical worlds. Sensors in exoskeletal appliances assist mobility and balance, and remote monitoring systems pull data from the cloud gather from devices located anywhere with internet access. In spite of this, people still need to physically visit hospitals, medical centers, and clinics. It’s not always easy to figure out where to go once you get there. If you’re a patient already upset or anxious about a health condition or an upcoming procedure, deciphering maps and posted directional signs can be bewildering. Larger medical complexes sometimes reshuffle clinics, specialty facilities, and provider offices. Even if nothing changes location, the first few visits to a large facility can add another level of stress. When all you want to do is get help or answers to scary questions, solving a maze to reach your destination within a facility seems an unnecessary barrier.

Many large medical facilities assign staff or volunteers to guide patients and visitors to their intended destination. Clearwater, Florida’s BayCare Health System recently introduced BayCare Compass, a mobile wayfinding app. Connexient‘s MediNav platform, deployed in more than two dozen major U.S. health systems, powers BayCare Compass. Patients and visitors to the BayCare locations can download the free app from the Apple App store or Google Play. The app includes detailed maps of publicly available hospital floors, a directory of publicly available departments and clinics, real-time location, hospital points of interest, and even driving and parking directions.

BayCare’s first BayCare Compass installation at St. Anthony’s Hospital in St. Peterburg launched in August 2017. Following a rolling schedule, the current plan is to incorporate all fourteen BayCare hospitals in the system by 2019. Some health tech developments progress hand-in-hand with the latest genetic unravelings or neural networking artificial intelligence machine learning constructs. In the case of BayCare Compass, however, the helpful app proposes to figuratively take you by the hand to lead you to your destination.